Of all web technical advances I think photo sharing is the easiest to explain and justify. We've always wanted to share our photos - remember the classic slide night? That most venerable of institutions where you bored everyone to distraction with millions of holiday slides? How about Auntie Mary showing you an album of cousin Jenny's (three times removed) wedding? Sites like Flickr and Photobucket just make this process easier and so much wider. Suddenly you can share with the entire world!
The software is remarkably easy to use. In no time at all I had a large number of photos awaiting my tagging and captioning love. It may take some time to do this for a large collection of photos. The advantage being that barring a catastrophic failure of website (financial or technical) you could caption from any computer in the world.
I think the best feature is that you can choose to share some images and not others. You may decide to keep images of yourself and your family private while sharing scenic images.
It seems the perfect way to store and share images for a library. But I can't see many libraries storing all of their images this way. I can't imagine telling a customer that they can access some of our precious local history images via our Flickr page. I'm not even sure why! It just seems more professional to have our own database. I suppose it offers far greater control of format, features and levels of access. For happy snaps that we're willing to share with the world... What fun!
I think a Flickr workshop could be a viable idea for library programming - even for that notoriously difficult group the Young Adult.
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